Reading: Zechariah 9:9-12
"9:9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. 9:10 He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth."
According to the legends of the Hopi Nation in Arizona, our current cycle of civilization on Earth stretching out in time from the Great Deluge to the Modern Era. It is the Fourth World, already. The Creator, called Taiwa, created already three other previous worlds, where the people, though they were originally happy, became selfish and wicked and lived contrary to Taiwa's laws. They committed sexual immorality, they fought and killed one another, and they would not live in harmony.
The former worlds were destroyed along with their wicked inhabitants, though a few righteous people were always rescued to the next world in order to keep afloat some continuation, especially when according to the tradition, the last global catastrophe was the Great Flood.
According to the Greek Mythology there are five distinct ages and we live already in the fifth one. They call it Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron Ages. This is not completely different from the Hopi vision, when they declared then we live in the fourth world, because the so called Heroic age, designated so by the Greek, is not really an independent age, rather a transitional one, as they created a separate era as an events-bundled covering of the period between the coming of the Greeks to Thessaly and the Greek return from Troy. It was demarcated as one of the five Ages of Man by Hesiod, the great poet from the 8th century BC, who is charged of the creation or at least the description of the major bulk of the Greek mythology. As the whole period of the Heroic age spans roughly six generations, so it can not be acknowledged as a global age, it was just a Greek intermezzo. Thus we left only with four ages, exactly as the Roman poet, Ovid, simplified the five ages by reducing the number of ages to four: Gold, Bronze, Silver, and Iron.
With the exception of the Heroic Age, which is not a real age, so to speak, according to the Greek view, each succeeding age was worse than the one that went before, as humanity kept sinking in morals and spirituality.
According to the Hopi Nation in Arizona, each global age was similar to each other. They started well, but all ended badly, as the gradually more and more wicked humanity received punishment from the creator God, in a form of a global catastrophe.
The Greek view, by which we can assume it is the Western view as well, in the wikipedia explanation for the term of "Golden Age" ‘denotes a period of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity. People did not have to work to feed themselves for the earth provided food in abundance. They lived to a very old age with a youthful appearance, eventually dying peacefully, with spirits living on as "guardians". Plato in his work, Cratylus, clarifies that Hesiod did not mean by Golden Age, that it was literally made of gold, but good and noble.’
Ovid wrote that justice and peace dominated in the Golden Age. In the Silver Age, men consequently learn the art of agriculture and architecture. In the Bronze Age, men were prone to warfare, but not impiety. Finally, in the Iron Age, men created national borders on Earth, learned the arts of navigation and mining; they were warlike, greedy, and impious. And probably the worse of it, just coming, as technology advances.
For the sake of a literal Golden Age, of course we do not agree with the conspiracy theory that talks about ancient aliens, space travelers, mentioned frequently in the Mesopotamian mythology, who came to Earth, looking for gold, created the humans by some genetic manipulations as a slave race around 250 thousand years ago, putting them to mine Gold all around the world, especially in Africa.
We do not state that this happened, however science asserts that at least the bronze age literally existed in history. It started not after the golden or silver age, but after the stone age, called the neolithic.
With that the scientific classification of the ancient world eras is the most simplistic, like it has only three main stages, according to Thomsen, a Danish antiquarian. Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. Some people say that we might really live in the fourth world, because this is definitely the nuclear age, with its all consequences.
The Bronze Age was literally dubbed after a metal alloy, we call bronze which is mainly copper melted together with tin (or else). Bronze Age was around between 3400 BC to 1200 BC. Until the spread of the usage of the iron, the bronze represented the first real urban civilization versus the stone age, the bronze represented the advanced technology of metallurgy and the establishment of such empires like Sumer, Elam, Egypt, the Indus Valley and later Greece and so on.
The urbanization and the broadening social stratification brought the development of the first writing systems of the world in Mesopotamia (cuneiform script) and in Egypt.
When the Bronze Age civilization collapsed (except in Egypt) around 1200 BC, it took around almost 200 years of dark times, when the urban civilization was able to reboot into the Iron Age. Despite the Greek view of the metaphorical names of the ages, the Iron Age again arrived literally with the technology when the production of iron or steel became so widespread that iron tools and weapons superior to their bronze equivalents substituted almost completely the general usage of the bronze.
Despite the fact that between the two ages , bronze and iron ages respectively, the transition was not really smooth, and the entire urban civilization collapsed in the Middle East for almost centuries, the new era, the Iron Age was not profoundly different from the former Bronze.
The old empires improved their weaponry, their armors, their chariots, their tools, their hearts from bronze to iron, otherwise till the modern era, till the industrial revolution almost nothing really or profoundly changed, except that the empires grew stronger, slavery and the oppression became more and more cruel.
Just as Daniel the prophet interpreted Nebuchadnezzar's dream to the Emperor, in the 6th century BC.
“ Your Majesty, you are the king of kings. The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory; in your hands he has placed all mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds in the sky. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler over them all. You are that head of gold. “After you, another kingdom will arise, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. ”
In the emperor’s dream the gold meant Babylon, the silver meant Persia, the bronze meant the rule of Alexander the Great and his successors, and the iron meant Rome.
Nothing really changed, empires were born, empires triumphed, empires sank, empires disappeared, new empires came, slavery, oppression and perpetual warfare stayed.
Nothing really changed, ironically saying, until literally, the iron itself started to change, when people discovered the ways of the mass production of the steel. Until that, just a very few places in India or Turkey were able to manage to get a little steel from the iron smelting. Usually they only had wrought iron, which is a very flexible form of the metal but not too durable, and the cast iron which was very hard like a gun ball, but it was also fragile.
The little steel they had was used for extraordinary artifacts, like master swords.
Like on a spring afternoon in the 14th century two iron smiths were hammering a peace of steel on the anvil in the very city of Damascus, in order that after a very delicate, sophisticated and long process they will create a word renowned wonder called the Damascus sabre.
The two smiths had to cooperate on a nearly impossible level. They had to maintain the steadily hot and exact temperature of the steel and their hammering had to be so synchronized to each other’s moves that even half second changes in their rhythm could have resulted in devastation regarding the quality of the sword.
In each turn they shouted: My time, your time, my time, your time, my time, your time.
The table of the ancient technology, including the medieval conditions as well, turned upside down, when the iron started to change into steel, by mass production. Again it was a literal change, and it came with the industrial revolution as it needed steel to expand its scope and its realm. We could call the industrial age steel age as well, however it is not that different from the Iron Age, because the steel age is just a transitional one.
The real jump into an other age was not really from the iron to the steel, not from the ox-pulled-cart to the combustion engine, from horseback riding to the Airbus, from the Damascus sabre to the machine gun, but the real jump was the reaching of the nuclear age.
And again it is quite literal. And again it is something to do with metals, at this time, uranium. However, the alchemists, for a long time, had been searching for the Philosopher’s stone. They believed when they possess it, they will be able to turn any elements, especially metals into gold as they please. It can be true philosophically as well, as the Greek would say that if we have the Philosopher’s stone, or the ability to change the iron to gold, then we will be able to go back from the iron age to the golden age.
It can be true literally as well, as in the nuclear age we are able to change the elements on an atomic level, even into gold, by bombarding the atomic cores with subatomic particles.
This level of knowledge, the know-how of this very advanced technology may literally enable us to achieve a new golden age, at least regarding manufacturing. However, if we keep sinking in our morals, the same technology may also destroy our civilization, and the fifth world will be approaching according to the Hopi Nation.
Nonetheless, in the book of Daniel, the prophet continued the interpretation of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar saying:
“In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands—a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces. (… and ) The king said to Daniel, “Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery.”
The Rock is the Holy One who humiliates and will humiliate and will smash all the empires on Earth.
As it is written in the same book: “... a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken to pieces and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.”
SO BE IT, YOUR KINGDOM COME, May Your Name O Lord, Our Rock and Redeemer be praised for ever, Amen.
